9 Basic Mac Hacks To Make Your Life Super Easy

Have you always been a Windows person and now have recently switched to a MacBook Pro?

Do you find the Apple interface confusing?

Are you a Mac user, looking for tips to use your computer efficiently and make your work easier?

Advertising

If you’ve answered YES, at least once, then it’s time to check out a useful Mac guide. But read on, for these super simple Mac tricks will make you a MacBook Pro in no time!

1. Share or Tweet Any Text Immediately

Are you working on something important and you realized you need to mail the boss? Or you have typed something important to share but feel too lazy to open your inbox or Twitter feed? Then try this trick. Right click on the highlighted text to share it via email, iMessage, Facebook and Twitter and get your work done in a jiffy!

2. Paste Text Without Formatting:

Did you copy paste some information from Wikipedia but the formatting is all off and now you have to waste time fixing it to Times New Roman font size 12? Next time simply press Command + Shift + V to stop that from happening.

Advertising

3. A Very Handy Calculator

SpotLight is practically every Mac user’s favourite feature. But it’s not just a search feature. It has plenty of tricks hidden under its sleeve. You can even use it to do quick calculations and not open the Calculator. Simply type in the search bar and the answer will crop up. For instance, if you want to know what 569 + 731 is, simply type 569 + 731, and the answer 1300 will instantly appear below.

4. Turn Your Laptop Into a WiFi HotSpot

Does your friend need to download something important or answer an emergency work email? In that case you can share your MacBook internet with your friends. Turn on your device’s WiFi and follow these simple steps: System Preferences>Sharing>Internet Sharing (click, not tick)>Ethernet>WiFi
Your friend can now use your WiFi to browse the internet on his/her device.

5. Invert Colours and Save Your Eyes

Are you working outdoors and the weather’s too sunny? Or do your eyes just hurt too much from an all-nighter? Either way, you can invert the colours on the screen and save the eye strain. First ensure that the ‘Invert Colours’ option is turned on by going to Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Accessibility and then pressing command+ option + control + 8 and voila!

Read Next

6. Free Up Memory When Your Computer Gets Slow

Sometimes computers can get sluggish and we all hate those times. However there’s a quick fix for this. Just open the Terminal Application and type in “purge” in the command line and it will free up at least 500+ mb the first time.

7. Find Information With A Click

Do you want to find out more about something you’re working on but you feel too lazy to Google? Simply place your mouse cursor over the text and press command + control + D and you’ll get a pop up menu displaying the Dictionary, Thesaurus and Wikipedia entries of the same.

8. Get Your Special Character With A Click

Do you often use accented or foreign words in your writing? If yes, then you’ll be using a lot of special characters. To make it easier to type, just press and hold the letter of the special character (I, E, O, U, etc) you want to type and a menu will show up.

Advertising

9. Stop Your Mac From Sleeping When It’s Idle

Are you working on something and you are suddenly called? Or perhaps you need to take a quick break? And by the time you’ve come back, your Mac has gone to sleep mode and you have to wake it up again? Then use this fun hack: go the Terminal command line and type in “caffeinate” and press Enter. Voila, your Mac will never go to sleep again (unless you cancel this command, of course)

Not only will these tips save you precious time, but it will also make you more efficient and organized and enable you to finish your work faster. Plus, you’ll discover all sorts of amazing features you never knew your Mac had had! Better yet, share these hacks with your friends and make their lives easier.

7 Tools to Help Keep Track of Goals and Habits Effectively

Now that 2011 is well underway and most people have fallen off the bandwagon when it comes to their New Year’s resolutions (myself included), it’s a good time to step back and take an honest look at our habits and the goals that we want to achieve.

Something that I have learned over the past few years is that if you track something, be it your eating habits, exercise, writing time, work time, etc. you become aware of the reality of the situation. This is why most diet gurus tell you to track what you eat for a week so you have an awareness of the of how you really eat before you start your diet and exercise regimen.

Tracking daily habits and progress towards goals is another way to see reality and create a way for you clearly review what you have accomplished over a set period of time. Tracking helps motivate you too; if I can make a change in my life and do it once a day for a period of time it makes me more apt to keep doing it.

So, if you have some goals and habits in mind that need tracked, all you need is a tracking tool. Today we’ll look at 7 different tools to help you keep track of your habits and goals.

Joe’s Goals

Advertising

Joe’s Goals is a web-based tool that allows users to track their habits and goals in an easy to use interface. Users can add as many goals/habits as they want and also check multiple times per day for those “extra productive days”. Something that is unique about Joe’s Goals is the way that you can keep track of negative habits such as eating out, smoking, etc. This can help you visualize the good things that you are doing as well as the negative things that you are doing in your life.

Joe’s Goals is free with a subscription version giving you no ads and the “latest version” for $12 a year.

Daytum

is an in depth way of counting things that you do during the day and then presenting them to you in many different reports and groups. With Daytum you can add several different items to different custom categories such as work, school, home, etc. to keep track of your habits in each focus area of your life.

Advertising

Daytum is extremely in depth and there are a ton of settings for users to tweak. There is a free version that is pretty standard, but if you want more features and unlimited items and categories you’ll need Daytum Plus which is $4 a month.

Excel or Numbers

If you are the spreadsheet number cruncher type and the thought of using someone else’s idea of how you should track your habits turns you off, then creating your own Excel/Numbers/Google spreadsheet is the way to go. Not only do you have pretty much limitless ways to view, enter, and manipulate your goal and habit data, but you have complete control over your stuff and can make it private.

Read Next

What’s nice about spreadsheets is you can create reports and can customize your views in any way you see fit. Also, by using Dropbox, you can keep your tracker sheets anywhere you have a connection.

Evernote

Advertising

I must admit, I am an Evernote junky, mostly because this tool is so ubiquitous. There are several ways you can implement habit/goal tracking with Evernote. You won’t be able to get nifty reports and graphs and such, but you will be able to access your goal tracking anywhere your are, be it iPhone, Android, Mac, PC, or web. With Evernote you pretty much have no excuse for not entering your daily habit and goal information as it is available anywhere.

Evernote is free with a premium version available.

Access or Bento

If you like the idea of creating your own tracker via Excel or Numbers, you may be compelled to get even more creative with database tools like Access for Windows or Bento for Mac. These tools allow you to set up relational databases and even give you the option of setting up custom interfaces to interact with your data. Access is pretty powerful for personal database applications, and using it with other MS products, you can come up with some pretty awesome, in depth analysis and tracking of your habits and goals.

Bento is extremely powerful and user friendly. Also with Bento you can get the iPhone and iPad app to keep your data anywhere you go.

Advertising

You can check out Access and the Office Suite here and Bento here.

Analog Bonus: Pen and Paper

All these digital tools are pretty nifty and have all sorts of bells and whistles, but there are some people out there that still swear by a notebook and pen. Just like using spreadsheets or personal databases, pen and paper gives you ultimate freedom and control when it comes to your set up. It also doesn’t lock you into anyone else’s idea of just how you should track your habits.

Conclusion

I can’t necessarily recommend which tool is the best for tracking your personal habits and goals, as all of them have their quirks. What I can do however (yes, it’s a bit of a cop-out) is tell you that the tool to use is whatever works best for you. I personally keep track of my daily habits and personal goals with a combo Evernote for input and then a Google spreadsheet for long-term tracking.

What this all comes down to is not how or what tool you use, but finding what you are comfortable with and then getting busy with creating lasting habits and accomplishing short- and long-term goals.